The fall of Rome has an identical mechanism to Project 2025. Same sequence. Same logic. Same result.
Step One: Kill the Best General
Rome. 408 AD.
Flavius Stilicho was the last general who consistently defeated Alaric and the Visigoths in the field. He held the Western Empire together while it was being attacked simultaneously across Gaul, Britain, Hispania, and Italy. He was part-Vandal by descent. The court never trusted him because of it.[^1]
When political rivals told Emperor Honorius that Stilicho was colluding with barbarians, Honorius had him lured out of sanctuary on false orders. He was executed in 408 AD. Gibbon called him “the last of the Roman generals”.[^2]
What happened immediately after:
Stilicho’s officers were arrested or killed
30,000 Germanic soldiers who had served Rome loyally read the executions as a declaration of war on anyone of foreign origin[^1]
They defected en masse to Alaric
Two years later, Alaric sacked Rome — the first time the city’s walls had been breached in 800 years[^1]
Rome. 454 AD.
Flavius Aetius stopped Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. That was the only engagement that prevented the Hunnic advance into Western Europe. Emperor Valentinian III was jealous. He stabbed Aetius personally in the throne room in 454 AD.[^3]
A Roman historian recorded the observation: Valentinian had cut off his right hand with his left. The Western Empire collapsed 22 years later.[^4]
The pattern: Competent general. Loyalty suspect to ruler. Political removal. No knowledge transfer. Military collapse within years.
Step Two: The Current Documented Sequence
These are not allegations. These are on the record.
February 2025 — Mass firing, no cause stated:
General CQ Brown — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired[^5][^6]
Admiral Lisa Franchetti — Chief of Naval Operations, fired same day[^6]
General James Slife — Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, fired same day[^6]
April 2025:
Timothy Haugh — Director of the NSA, fired[^5]
Over a dozen National Security Council staff removed same week[^5]
Jeffrey Kruse — Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, removed after presenting intelligence assessments that “diverged from the administration’s public narrative”[^5]
April 2026:
General Randy George — Army Chief of Staff, 38 years of service, Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — fired[^7]
Replaced by Christopher LaNeve, a former senior military assistant to Hegseth personally[^5]
John Phelan — Navy Secretary, fired during an active naval blockade of Iran, no explanation given[^5]
On the record from CBS Pentagon reporter Eleanor Watson:
“These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service. None of them has been charged with any wrongdoing and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty.”[^7]
What Hegseth then did:
Personally blocked colonels from promotion to one-star general — a process that normally runs through months of merit review by the services themselves[^7]
Overruled a formal Army investigation into Apache helicopter pilots on his personal X account[^7]
The Secretary of Defence is now personally managing who gets promoted from colonel
Senator Jack Reed stated directly: “This appears to be part of a broader, premeditated campaign by Trump and Hegseth to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons, which would undermine the professionalism of our military.”[^5]
Step Three: What Walks Out the Door
Skills do not transfer in an onboarding document.
Air Force officers are leaving at 7% annually. Airmen at 11%. Those are 350% and 550% above national averages[^8]
4,000 troops left cyber positions in 2024 alone against a 16% vacancy rate the DoD cannot fill[^8]
Replacing a military-grade cybersecurity specialist takes three years and $500,000[^8]
Replacing a logistics officer with a master’s degree takes 18 months minimum[^8]
Jeffrey Kruse — the DIA director fired for inconvenient assessments — took 20 years of human intelligence network knowledge with him. That cannot be reconstructed. It cannot be improvised. It cannot be replaced by political alignment.[^5]
Growing numbers of serving personnel are leaving too.
From April 2026, discharge counselling centres that previously received a handful of calls per week were receiving three to four calls per day. Army career counsellors confirmed both retirees and first-term contract holders were asking how to leave. The cited reasons: the Iran war, US-Israeli operations in Lebanon, and the cultural shift under the current administration.[^9]
Step Four: What the Signal Chat Confirms
This is where the operational proof is.
Hegseth broadcast F-18 launch windows, strike timings, MQ-9 drone deployment schedules, and Tomahawk sequences on an unencrypted commercial app. The group included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer. This happened one day after the Pentagon issued a warning that Russia was actively attempting to compromise Signal. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not included in the principals chat at all.[^10][^11][^12]
The Pentagon Inspector General confirmed this violated Pentagon regulations and could have endangered pilots and the mission.[^13]
This is Honorius refusing to let Stilicho attend the war council and then losing Italy.
Step Five: The Loyalty Replacement Problem
Honorius replaced Stilicho with men he trusted. They lost Italy.
The mechanism is not simply that loyal people lack skills. It is that loyalty-selected promotion systems destroy the culture that produces competent people. Every officer still serving watches what is being rewarded. The signal sent by Hegseth personally blocking promotions he disapproved of is received by every officer still in post: alignment is the variable, not performance.[^7]
Academic analysis of military purge sequences is clear on what happens next. Purges targeting senior and mid-level officers simultaneously eliminate both leadership and the institutional networks that sustain operational knowledge. What remains is not a military. It is a politically compliant structure wearing a military’s uniform, equipped with a military’s weapons, without a military’s institutional capacity.[^14]
Step Six: The Discharged Soldiers
Rome did not just lose Stilicho. It lost the relationship between the soldier and the state.
When Stilicho was killed, the 30,000 soldiers who had served Rome faithfully did not become confused or lost. They made a rational assessment: the institution had declared war on people like them. They acted on that assessment. They walked to the enemy. They were correct to do so.[^1]
The current US military is expelling, not executing, its senior officer corps. Every fired general is alive. They are connected to networks of serving and retired officers who watched it happen. They possess institutional knowledge the replacements do not have. They have been given a specific political reason to be hostile to the administration that expelled them.
Joe Kent, former Green Beret and CIA paramilitary officer, was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He resigned in March 2026. His letter was public and specific:
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”[^15][^16]
Trump called him “weak on security”. The administration dismissed his letter as containing “false claims.”[^16]
Kent was a Green Beret. He knows what he is talking about. He is now outside the institution, on record that the war is based on false grounds, and connected to an extensive network of people who agree with him.
Step Seven: What the Roman Historians Recorded
Procopius, writing in the 6th century, assessed that the Western Empire did not collapse under military defeat. It collapsed under institutional self-destruction. The Eastern Empire survived for another thousand years because it maintained a professional officer class, preserved institutional knowledge through administrative continuity, and explicitly avoided the Western pattern of loyalty-over-competence after 476 AD.[^17]
The compounding mechanism the historians recorded — which was not visible in the moment — was this:
Each purge made the next military failure more likely. Each military failure produced political pressure to find a scapegoat. Each scapegoat produced the next purge. The cycle accelerated.
It took approximately 70 years from Stilicho’s execution in 408 AD to the formal deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD. Rome had centuries to build before that. The degradation was still visible in real time to anyone looking at the data.[^18]
What Project 2025 Documented in Advance
The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership — Project 2025 — proposed presidential review of all general and flag officer promotions, prioritising “warfighting prowess” over “social engineering”. That is the policy language. The operational result is what is documented above: Hegseth personally managing promotion lists, firing 20+ generals and admirals, replacing them with loyalists, and broadcasting active strike packages on an unencrypted commercial messaging app.[^19]
Honorius’s court told him Stilicho was a traitor because his competence threatened their influence. Stilicho was accused of being too Vandal. The current officers were accused of being too DEI. The functional result is identical.
The Romans chiselled Stilicho’s name off his monument in the Forum after his death. Damnatio memoriae — erasure from the record.[^2]
It was written down elsewhere. The record survived. This is what that looks like.
References
Flavius Stilicho - Roman general - Italy On This Day - Flavius Stilicho, who for part of his career could be considered the most powerful man in the Wester...
The Last of the Roman Generals - Osprey Publishing - Having taken him into custody, the legionary officer produced a second set of orders countermanding ...
Flavius Aetius, “MAGISTER MILITUM” of the Western Roman Empire ... - Daniel Davison - both Aetius and Aurelian were outstanding commanders as was Stilicho. All three sen...
Flavius Aetius: Last of the Romans | PDF | Huns | Late Antiquity - Despite his successes, Aetius was assassinated in 454 CE, leading to the accelerated decline of the ...
Explainer: What lies behind dismissal of top military leaders in ... - Since January 2025, a notable number of senior U.S. military and defense officials have been dismiss...
Trump fires top US general CQ Brown in shake-up at Pentagon - BBC - The new Pentagon chief had accused CQ Brown of a “woke” focus on diversity, equity and inclusion pro...
Hegseth ousts Army chief of staff in latest Pentagon purge - YouTube - Army Chief of Staff Randy George is out of a job as part of the Trump administration’s most recent P...
The U.S. Military Has a ‘Hemorrhaging’ Retention Crisis - Key Points and Summary: While the U.S. military met its 2025 recruitment goals, it faces a catastrop...
A Growing Number of Service Members are Seeking Military ... - President Trump’s recent militant decisions and operations have left a growing number of service mem...
The Atlantic releases the Signal chat showing Hegseth’s detailed ... - In the group chat, Hegseth posted multiple details about the impending strike, using military langua...
Pentagon Chief Hegseth Shared Sensitive Yemen War Plans In ... - Pentagon Chief Hegseth Shared Sensitive Yemen War Plans In Second Signal Chat: Source | N18G. 1.5K v...
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans - At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” could conceivabl...
Hegseth could have endangered troop safety with Signal chat - BBC - In sharing details about an attack in a group chat on the unsecured app, the defence secretary put t...
How the Strategic Purges of State Security Personnel Protect Dictators - I argue that leaders can use purges to undermine collective action capacity within cliques by target...
Senior US official resigns in protest of Iran war | Responsible Statecraft - Joe Kent said he could not ‘in good conscience support’ a conflict that ‘serves no benefit to the Am...
Top US counterterrorism official Joe Kent resigns over Iran war - BBC - National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent says Trump “started this war due to pressure from...
Quality of Late Roman Legions - Roman Army Talk - 1) For some reason, the days when Roman legions could stand up against an enemy several times their ...
Fall of the Western Roman Empire - Wikipedia - By 476, the position of Western Roman Emperor wielded negligible military, political, or financial p...
Project 2025: The Department of Defense - The Fulcrum - After reading Project 2025’s 45-page section on the Defense Department and related arms of the gover...
You’ve done something very clever here, and presented context for an angle of Project 2025 that I hadn’t caught before. Thanks for the enriching work you do!
this gives the vibe of the start of the decline of ottoman empire, when Suleiman the magnificent actually married his concubine, and made her a wife, in turn making her children the only heirs instead of having all of the kids of concubines compete against each other. You can't see it from upclose, but once zoomed out it becomes more clear id say